HOLIDAY OF GOOD CHEER

It was 7am of Christmas Day and I was driving home, all roads empty and all skies gray. The car stereo was playing my favorite Christmas song, What Child is This, sung by Third Day, but my mind was drawn more to the city that was damp and quiet and absolutely deserted. I wanted to scream, Hello!, Hello!, Is this a joke!, Uncle Frank!, Is this a joke! - like the little Kevin who woke up one morning finding himself home alone and of no family, but of course I can't be a big Little Kevin; I had never dreamed of my family to vanish even by way of a joke... and I will not want the scenario of a post-apocalyptic Miami either; the place was just a little too methodical to be apt for doomsday.

I was driving from the hospital. I had to go home and be relieved of my chore by a sister because of the 9am Mass that holy day that I needed to usher. The entire year I looked forward to shaking Miamian hands again on Christmas Day, having spent it the last four years outside the city. Nothing beats the experience of saying Merry Christmas to parishioners while standing by the door of a welcoming Church - every warm handshake seemed to entrap and discharge a sin off my soul, and every contact, I was to learn later, was like holy shock that jolted me off from a slumbering moment of denigration.

At Church, while doing the usual functions, I was thinking how the previous night, Christams eve, was unusual. It was spent in a hospital and holding the fort, and watching each drop of dextrose unto the tube that will later settle in the patient's vein had its own sense of calming quality, like watching an hourglass in a sacred moment of consecrating time.

Three days before Christmas, it was a Monday, I was talking to my mother on the phone. Before I hung up, I heard her scream, Virgen de la Soledad!, which was then followed by a commotion. I had to hurry and find out what happened, and the 3 minute drive from my place to hers felt like all of 3 hours. When I got to my sister's house where Mom lives, she was lying on the kitchen floor, a bump the size of half a baseball on her head, a bruise the size of my hand on her shoulder, and her right ear was bleeding; the fell caused such an impact that her hearing aid shattered inside her ear into a hundred tiny pieces.

New Year's eve we were back at my sister's house, and as we clanged each other's champagne glasses we found no other word coming a close second to our moment of cheer, To Moms!, and each sip of the bubbly was as momentous as each New Year's eve spent with the family. There was a pad and a pen close to Moms as she was sitting at one end of the tabble. The sheet contained scribbles, Happy New year...I love You... Did you need anything else?... and other worthy scribbles which somehow represented some significant communication.

She was smiling her gorgeous smile, belying a world of body aches and pains that would have equalled the fate of a tortured human condition, and she took everything in good stride. This, she must have thought, is the smile of somebody who will no longer suffer the noise of the world.